Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @06:32AM
from the what-won't-someone-do-next dept.

angry tapir writes with this excerpt from Tech World: "Researchers from German security firm Recurity Labs have released a JavaScript implementation of the OpenPGP specification that allows users to encrypt and decrypt webmail messages. Called GPG4Browsers, the tool functions as an extension for Google Chrome and now is capable of working with GMail."
A quick gander at the source leaves me with the impression that it should be more or less portable to other browsers. It's also built using a lot of off-the-shelf Javascript libraries. (Who knew Javascript had a bignum library and a number of cipher implementations?)

I'm afraid I have to agree on this one... Recently a programmer was let go because he simply couldn't creatively code his way out of a paper bag. Of course now I'm stuck picking up the slack, but 1/3 of my time was spent helping the other guy, and most of what he got done is what I actually did.

Douglas Crockford has some weird recommendations that seem to come from him being bitten by evil hacks by a real nutjob once upon a time (maybe himself?). I don't think he represents the majority of Javascript programmers.

It's a bit like if you were in a C++ team and someone thought it would be fun to overload the + operator to do weird things on ints. Afterwards you're so scared that you go around advocating people use c_mathlibrary_plus(a, b) instead of using + since someone might have hacked the +. IMHO that's not relevant advice for most people.

Of course, some people think that languages where you can mess with things are evil. But it's not that easy. To take the operator overloading example: If you've ever tried expressing an algorithm involving lots of vector and matrix math in a language that doesn't allow overloading of operators, you'll see what I mean. It's true, of course, that most of the time you should stay far away from that sort of magic, and it's just plain stupid that C++ hints that frivolous operator overloading is okay by doing it in the standard I/O library.

Same thing with Javascript. The basic stuff will get you through 99.9% of the cases.

This is from my own blog... JavaScript Books That Should Be Required Reading [frugalcoder.us], and still pretty relevant.. there are also a couple of APress books for more advanced topics. Also, if you are interested in the language itself, getting into NodeJS, or MongoDB isn't a bad way to do it out of the browser.

Which is why node.js is constantly losing popularity and dynamic web pages are being replaced by static ones, right?

(For the record, this dipship knows more than JS, but thinks that JS, with all its flaws, is mainly misunderstood and especially taught wrong. But many of the flaws could be rectified with the adoption of Harmony - but, while other browsers are quite quick in adapting new technologies, IE will probably prevent the change for many years to come)

It can't be done. The problem is that the language itself is so horribly broken that anything built upon it, be it libraries, applications, tutorials or books, will inherently be horrible, too. JavaScript just can't be salvaged. It needs to be discarded.

I used to think this, but I don't any more. The aforementioned Crockford book is the bible on this.

There is a "pleasant" Javascript community, and what they have done is to separate Javascript into three parts:
- the good parts -- use them
- the bad parts -- avoid using them altogether
- the missing parts -- build acceptable workarounds to these using what's available

For example, Javascript has a horrible tendency for scripts to pollute the global variable namespace. The community came up with the CommonJS module convention, which solves the problem rather neatly.

JavaScript is a fad that's on its way out. The same thing happened to Ruby due to Ruby on Rails. The Ruby hype really started taking off around 2006, but by 2010 people realized how shitty Ruby and RoR actually are. That's why we hear almost nothing about either of them these days. The same thing is happening to JavaScript, although it's delayed slightly. It really started taking off around 2008, so it's a couple of years behind Ruby. By 2013, it's likely that JavaScript and its advocates will be widely shunned, too.

2008? JavaScript gained widespread popularity around mid-1996, so by your reckoning it should have faded away sometime in 2001. Like all languages, JavaScript has its warts and WTF moments, but it is the poor craftsman who blames his tools, especially if those tools are being used by millions of other craftsman around the world to create all manner of novel and useful applications (to admittedly varying levels of quality, but again that's more about the developer's skill level than the language itself). Solving the JavaScript problem is a simple five-step process, though: create the One Perfect Language, convince the major browser manufacturers to include a flawless implementation, get all of the current JS developers to learn to code in it correctly, rewrite all existing codebases in it, and make the entire world upgrade their browsers. Done! Now, what's for lunch...?

I think it might be useful for messaging in environments where authorities try to monitor communication. Without the decryption key you just see a stream of encrypted data. Keys would be distributed off-line.

No, it isn't. This article implicitly assumes user trusts server with everything or not at all. Not a case with GMail: in most attack models I can perfectly assume Google will deliver me correct Javascript code over SSL, but never trust it with securing my email content. Account hijacks are quite usual and replacing code on GMail servers is completely another thing.

You are being extremely naive. There was about 3 registrar issues last summer, and it's a well known FACT that governments (at least China and USA) are playing with certs (there was some real life cases reported, it's not just wild guesses here...). So if a government wants to get your key, it'd be really easy for them to replace the HTTPS hosted javascript. Do not forget too that there's the patriot act, and that you may very well be considered as a terrorist (everybody is, these days).

The above was written by someone without an understanding of public key cryptography. All you need to do is ensure that the crypto JavaScript is delivered through a secure channel. Once you have done that you can publish a public key on an insecure site and allow people to send data to you which cannot be intercepted. You can also let them generate a key pair and send you the public key, after which you can send them a response.

This is something that webmail has need for ages. Encrypted email is relatively easy to implement, and is free, but webmail makes it difficult to do without handing your keys over to a third party (GMail, HotMail, etc). This solves the problem nicely. It would be great to see this, or something similar widely adopted.

Hushmail lost a lot of credibility a few years ago when it turned out that its most commonly-used encryption method that ran server-side was delivered in a modified state at the request of government agencies. Yes, there are issues with trusting anything server-side, but its promises started sounding hollow when the CTO openly admitted it.

If you built your own applet from the public source code, the interception was not an issue, but if you used the easier mechanism hosted by Hushmail, you were at risk of your mail being decrypted and turned over.

Because you just need the secure channel to exchange the keys, and once that is done you can use any other channel even when the secure channel is not available to you. This is, in fact, the entire point of cryptography. If everyone had access to a known secure channel of infinite bandwidth at all times, then there would be no need for it.

In the last year or so suddenly everyone seems to write everything in javascript whether appropriate or not. So these guys really think the future of development lies in the browser which will what, replace the OS as the top level development platform? Sorry , but thats rubbish. It aint gonna happen. Too many disperate browsers with their own quirks and bugs, poor performance and ultimately limited functionality.

So other than "to see if it can be done" what exactly is the point of these projects? However much webdevs might like it to happen, javascript won't be replacing Java, C++ or C# anytime soon for serious development.

Email encryption (OpenPGP and SMIME ) is done on the client side. People have to use to email client softwares ( outlook, thunderbird..etc) to encrypt/sign their messages.The problem, what if you dont wanna use an email client ?The solution 1 - Do it manually ( copy, encrypt/sign , past)
OR - Implement it on the "new" client software (ie: the browser )The reason of javascript is th

In the last year or so suddenly everyone seems to write everything in C whether appropriate or not. So these guys really think the future of development lies in the windows interface which will what, replace the command-line as the top level development platform? Sorry , but thats rubbish. It aint gonna happen. Too many disperate GUIs with their own quirks and bugs, poor performance and ultimately limited functionality.

COBOL compiles to _________.FORTRAN compiles to _________.C compiles to ___________.Javascript compiles to ___________.

There really isn't a good way to compile to Javascript because of the amount the backend work that is needed for it to run (garbage collection anyone). They could try to do what "Go" does and include the garbage collection functionality in the system libraries or in the executable.

Also, no sane OS dev would ever use Javascript for their language of choi

So these guys really think the future of development lies in the browser which will what, replace the OS as the top level development platform? Sorry , but thats rubbish. It aint gonna happen.

Altogether replace? For everyone? Maybe not.

But while I use MS Office for my job, *all* my personal word-processing and spreadsheeting is done in Google Docs, and *all* my personal email has been in GMail ever since I got my beta invite -- and I'm not alone. There are flaws in these applications, but they're all outweighed by the ease of moving between computers, and sharing documents with other people.

It's more portable than anything else, and it's capable of more than popups. I can only see this trend utilizing processing power better than the (now fading) model of "do it all on the server". How many more people will use PGP if it's built into their webmail client? They won't need to install anything, configure anything - just use.

There are a number of things I'd like to push to the browser. With accompanying server fallbacks, browser processing could greatly reduce my server load which would increa

Javascript is the only language actually delivering on the promise of "write-once-run-anywhere." Well, "anywhere" that has a web browser, which is just about any device that does human interaction these days. All the other languages you mentioned have numerous environmental dependencies (separately installed run-times, OS specific conditionals, browser plug-ins, compiler specifics, etc.). Javascript sucks in many ways, but it sucks less than the alternatives for building an application quickly that can wor

The traditional operating system controls access to hardware, virtual memory, provides an API and schedules processes. Something will still have to do that so the "traditional" OS isn't going anywhere. It'll probably just be less obvious.

I encountered what was at least a serious attempt to do exaxtly the same thing in the mid-90s.
And I used it, too. Together with a colleague. We both worked in a tiny outfit where the boss was meddling in corruption with local politicians and corporate local heroes. Having such a thing as PGP usable in browsers and email clients truly was PGP to us: pretty good protection ( for the evidence we found against our boss ).

Wait, you mailed encrypted evidence to the clients and would have given them the key in case stuff turned bad?

Interesting idea, I think it would have been better to mail that to newspapers and maybe directly file a complaint. Though, your business.... Well, on second thought "get a new job" would have been an appropriate solution, too.

So where do the keys get stored? If it's the HTML web storage, does that mean that you can only store keys per domain? Is that even advisable? And what stops a compromised site from lifting your keys while it's about encrypting or signing a message for you?

I think for reasons of trust that if you were to use js PGP that it should be from a browser extension that could be reviewed and be within your control to some extent. Or better yet if the js became a core part of a browser where the code could be implicitly trusted. I'd love to see something like Firefox support go further and use a lib like this so unsigned certs could instead describe a web of trust via PGP and modify the manner in which Firefox presents such certs to a user. CAs are the biggest racket on the web and are IMO the biggest impediment to https being the default protocol for web activity.

"I'd love to see something like Firefox support go further and use a lib like this so unsigned certs could instead describe a web of trust via PGP and modify the manner in which Firefox presents such certs to a user. CAs are the biggest racket on the web and are IMO the biggest impediment to https being the default protocol for web activity."

Convergence sounds close enough to what I suggested in another thread to make me think it's viable. But only if it becomes more than an extension - every modern browser needs to sign off on the concept and implement the core functionality as part of itself. I also wonder if notaries are enough, or whether it should be a bona fide web of trust. On another thread I suggested that trust for a company like Toys R Us would have more relevance to a visitor if it were signed by Lego, Hasbro, Microsoft, Visa etc. t

Have been working on something similar very very slowly: a single ASP.Net web page (which could easily be ported to PHP no doubt) that acted as a proxy web browser that encrypted its traffic using a GPG key randomly generated (or provided by the user). It'd be text only ( = no accusations of being used for child pr0n or for teh pirates) but the idea would be that anyone could drop it into their own website without having to configure it and instantly people living under opressive censoring regimes (China,Ir

Unfortunately it won't be until v3 that it can actually get you to realize that the purpose of a lover is something other than to sit elegantly with a book on the couch facing the stove, and even a massively parallel supercomputer will never get you an actual lover, thereby making the code useless.

News flash: turing-complete programming languages can be used to created anything. Why is it news when another random project is done in Javascript?

Ah, the old Turing-complete chestnut. Just because something is possible, does not mean it is feasible, practical, or easy. It's probably possible to code it in brainfuck [muppetlabs.com], chef [dangermouse.net], lolcode [lolcode.com] or a bunch of rocks [xkcd.com] but no-one in their right mind would want to.

What's really interesting about this is that it now brings PGP to almost device with a browser - that is: those with browsers which have javascript support. This gives us such joys as iPhones with PGP that Apple can't suddenly decide they don't want people to h

Ah, the old Turing-complete chestnut. Just because something is possible, does not mean it is feasible, practical, or easy.

Doing PGP in Javascript isn't all that different from doing it in any other programming language. The only single difference between doing a random project in Javascript versus Perl, Ruby, Python or whatever is that since all the browsers run JS, the project is accessible to probably the largest possible user base. That makes JS cool to do a project in. But since this is true for everything done in JS, I really don't think it needs to be promoted on the front page every single time someone decides to develo

What's really interesting about this is that it now brings PGP to almost device with a browser - that is: those with browsers which have javascript support. This gives us such joys as iPhones with PGP that Apple can't suddenly decide they don't want people to have.

Apple doesn't give a shit if you have PGP on your iPhone or not. There are some decent PGP apps available for a fair price. http://ipgmail.com/ [ipgmail.com] for example.

FireGPG has to call a local copy of GPG outside of the browser. This GPG4Browsers all happens within the browser. The eventual goal seems to be to be able to provide OpenPGP even in environments where GPG is not installed on the OS and the user only has rights to run a web-browser.

The authors are aware of the following problems in the _prototype_: - this uses HTML5 local store which can't be cleared securely
- it lacks validation of certificates

I don't see why all the fuss is made about JS's capabilities. Coming from a very strong Perl/Unix background I see the appealing side of scripting. But if I take into account business programming, JS makes me shiver to the spine.

I grew up being generally interested in CS and specifically in programming. Most programmers I meet hardly ever cease to amaze me at the nonchalance which they adopt when writing code. You (dis-) qualify yourself with me as soon as the argument of "well it works" pops up. Program

The appeal of scripting languages in business apps, to me, is embedding. I don't really care whether it's Javascript, Python, Lua, Groovy or whatever else. Write the core of your application in Java or C, embed a script interpreter, bind some classes/functions and program the high level logic in the more readable, malleable scripting language.

This doesn't mean that non-programmers can be trusted to write those parts. But it means you can free up cognitive load when writing the business logic; the scripting

It's a "Haute Cuisine" dessert, I think. They sell it at the local boutique over-priced (e.g. organic, etc) food store by me. It doesn't look very appetizing.. do you spit out the wax, or try to eat around it?

Where do you get it that anyone but you has your private key? From TFA:

A PGP user who wants to send and receive encrypted emails from a different computer, would have to install it on that system first, import his private and public keys into the local database, known as the keyring, and then configure his email client.

Because of the security issues raised by any javascript code:
- transmitted from a potentially rooted server, or
- intercepted by a MITM attack, or
- received by a rooted client
this implementation is not secured as specified in the techworld article

Out of your three objections the second one is the only real concern that does not also apply to SSL. Transmission of the JavaScript does not have to come from the same machine as the one using it. If this catches on I would expect most people would download it from an SSL-secured plugin site. If the client is rooted, then absolutely nothing can protect you, including SSL.

The only real weakness is the man in the middle attack. Unless you can guarantee that the public certificate is from the source you have